Bug#995194: libopenal1: i386 baseline violation

[Nicholas Guriev]

On Ср, 2021-09-29 at 22:41 +0200, bret curtis wrote:
> Does anyone actually run or want to run openal-soft on a Pentium Pro?

Frankly, I have no so old hardware. My bug report was primarily about an
inconsistency. Wiki says i386 packages cannot use streaming extensions.
We should either avoid SIMD or raise minimal hardware requirements.

Debian Installation Guide[1] in paragraph 2.1.2.1 states that bullseye
will not run on Intel Pentium or earlier processor, however in section
3.4 the document mentions Pentium 4 as the minimal recommended CPU.
(I don't get is this a minimal or just a recommended requirement?)

I personally believe such a decision should be adopted globally for
every package in the archive by a compiler maintainer or a port
maintainer if this post exists.

On the flip side, there are middle solutions. OpenAL Soft may use
function multiversioning, GCC feature. Though, it requires support in
source code. Or the library can be compiled twice, first time with SSE2
and second time without the extension. Then a postinst script will
choose a correct shared object at configure time via dpkg-divert(1) or a
similar technique. But at this stage, a question arises about available
HDD space. Ancient hardware can face a shortage.

But if someone uses i386 for embedded systems with no extensions, it may
be better to split the port into two, the first one for compatibility
layer and the second one for unusual hardware.

 [1]: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/index.en.html

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